Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released 273
ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."
Great (Score:2, Informative)
They changed the location bar again.
Now I can watch people flip out about it on the interwebs for 6 months as well as being personally annoyed with re-getting used to how it functions.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar [mozilla.org] extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.
Re:Is it officially out? (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, yeah, you do if you're running 3.1b2. They have a beta update channel.
Re:Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 (Score:1, Informative)
Choking would require said wang to be long enough to pass the teeth, I think firefox is safe from your wrath.
Not officially out yet! (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas [mozilla.com] page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes [mozilla.com] page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.
The release linked to in the summary may not be the final, completed version, as Firefox 3.1 beta 3 has not been officially released yet. Download it at your own risk. You should wait until it's available through the links I give in this post.
Re:New location bar? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
F*** yes.
And having "sl" pull up "slashdot.org", followed by half a dozen unrelated sites that happen to have "sl" in their name, followed by the site that I was looking for that actually starts with "sl" but is "below the fold" because it's not awesome enough... really ticks me off. If I want to "search", I'll enter the name in the "search box". If I want to go to a website, I'll enter the site name in the location bar. I don't mind you searching titles as well, but list them below the URLs, OK?
Official release will be around 2pm PDT today (Score:5, Informative)
Hey everyone - glad you're excited about the new beta, we're pretty excited to release it. We actually haven't finished the QA on the download page, the update snippets, etc, yet. What you're seeing here is that last night we started sending out the final bits to our mirror network. So yes, you could go get it directly off the FTP servers, but that can overload mirrors and make it hard for other people to download it.
We'd prefer if you waited a few hours until about 2pm PDT when we'll be ready to update:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html [mozilla.com]
which uses our mirror-rotation script to ease the load of downloads.
Mike Beltzner
Director of Firefox Development
Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today (Score:2, Informative)
This link works, and seems to use the rotation script so I hope I'm not making things worse:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.1b3&os=linux&lang=en-US [mozilla.com]
(insert your OS of choice in the link)
TheUni
Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today (Score:2, Informative)
Pacific Daylight time. This is 5 pm Eastern Daylight time for those of us on the wrong coast.
Re:Mmm, bloat (Score:5, Informative)
>So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2,
yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.
>they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!
Yes. The web is a different place than it was even 5 years ago. Video is the norm, and once the video tag takes off, this will be very valuable to most users. Those that may not need or want video are probably smart enough to find a different browser that is more suitable to their needs.
>On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON.
JSON has been supported in FF since 3.0. FF 3.1 drops JSON.jsm for native JSON. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JSON [mozilla.org]
Re:New location bar? (Score:5, Informative)
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
Highlight in bar. Press delete.
Re:New location bar? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is it officially out? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you do. But the auto-update is not activated until later on, usually a couple of days after having the new version available through direct download.
Re:Bzzzt! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
You might look at the tab mix plus extension [mozilla.org]. It allows for a multi-level tab bar, among other handy features, like duplicating tabs and breaking a tab off into its own window.
Re:New location bar? (Score:2, Informative)
Try Shift-Delete on OS X.
(OS X.5.6, Firefox 3.0.7)
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Then you'll be happy to know 1 and 2 are both fixed. I'm not sure what you mean by 3. You can delete whatever entries you want by hitting Delete. They've added the following about:config options in 3.1:
* browser.urlbar.match.title: Returns results that match the text in the title.
* browser.urlbar.match.url: Returns results that match the text in the URL.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark: Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.history: Returns only results that are from the browser's history.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.tag: Returns only results that have been tagged.
You can also prefix any address with @ to match it to URLs without going in in changing that option.
XSS XmlHttpRequest Functionality (Score:4, Informative)
My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control [mozilla.org]). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.
It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.
I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Whoa there, guess you didn't see the news...
The upcoming release of 3.1 is going to be named 3.5.
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/3.5 [mozilla.org]
Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop (Score:5, Informative)
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism
It's easy to have a clean codebase when...
* No fullscreen mode.
* No detection of click-through
* Cut and paste uses icon-shape style instead of dragging an image
* Can't grow selection using cursor
* Not cross platform
* History is just a list of titles (can't even get URL info)
* History looks like a webpage, but you can't do text search or select or right-click on links
* Downloads looks like a webpage, but same problems as history
* Closing a window with multiple tabs nukes them with no warning.
* No 'view page info' showing links, media, etc
* No 'page style' css choices
* Poor handling of many tabs (they shrink forever).
* Can't control what sites are in the screenshots on start page
* Can't search inside and outside a text field at once (either or)
* Can't see pages that are in the cache (work offline mode)
* Print... just silently does nothing if no printer installed
* No rss support at all
* No multiple profiles
* With lots of bookmarks, it doesn't remember where you were in the list so you have to scroll to the bottom again to click more than one
* Can't allow/prevent pages from choosing their own fonts
* No whitelist for cookies
* No clearing of cookies on closing browser
* No separate proxy settings, have to use OS ones
* No settings for enable/disable Java, Javascript.
* Can't restrict Javascript behaviors, such as moving windows
* Can't disable image loading
* Can't modify MIME type mappings
* Can't set max history time in days or entries
* Can't set cache size
* No master password
* No whitelist to avoid site warnings
* No support for security devices
* Can't control update behavior
* Poor accessibility
* No autoscroll (fixed?)
* Can't clear all transfers (have to remove one by one)
* Buggy UI, for example Text Encoding menu doesn't autoscroll up despite having arrows (have to click arrow, can autoscroll down if wiggle mouse)
* No firebug equivalent.
* No mouse gestures.
* Plugins perform badly and/or fail
* Has bad rendering on many non-perfect sites (same with all WebKit browsers)
Oh yeah, and they stole the name 'chrome' from Mozilla, which is pretty scummy. They don't even give props to Mozilla for the name.
Let me know if these are outdated... I don't have my Windows vmware image handy.
Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today (Score:3, Informative)
We released early - go get it.
Re:Not officially out yet! (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nonconsole text editor? (Score:2, Informative)
What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?
Not a terminal window. vim is a console editor. Gvim is not, as it won't run in a telnet session. (never mind that virtually no one uses straight telnet anymore... but saying ssh opens too many possibilities...)